Innocent grifters

I've been reading Michael Gard's very interesting (and surprisingly funny) book The End of the Obesity Epidemic, which has special interest for me because he devotes a chapter to critiquing the work of what he calls "obesity skeptics," in particular that of Glenn Gaesser, Eric Oliver, and myself.

While Gard seems to agree with most of what the skeptics have to say, he does take us to task for going too far, in his view, in impugning the motives of those who are profiting from fat panic.  On reflection I believe much of this criticism is well taken: after more than a decade of engagement on this issue I've come to the conclusion that outright corruption among what I think of affectionately as the obesity mafia is much less common than genuine ideologically driven and culturally determined delusion.

A similar danger exists for critics of the current structure of legal academia.  I named this blog Inside the Law School Scam for two reasons:  to signal fundamental solidarity with the scam blog movement, and to indicate that, whatever the personal motives of people inside legal academia might be, law school has come to function as a scam in regard to the economic relations that exist between, on the one hand, legal academics and university administrators, and on the other, law students and law graduates.

A disadvantage of this approach is what might be called the innocent grifter defense: if particular individuals or institutional collectives of such people have, in all sincerity, no intention whatsoever of scamming anyone, and indeed will be sincerely horrified by any suggestion that they are doing so, how can one properly call the activity in which they're engaged a scam?

The answer, of course, is that from the perspective of the people being harned by the economic structure of the activity, it makes little if any practical difference whether those profiting from the harm have any intention of harming those people from whose injuries they are profiting, or indeed any consciousness that they are causing these harms.

(The parallels with the most sincere obesity warriors should be obvious. I'm sure the last thing Michelle Obama wants to do is to stigmatize fat kids. I'm equally confident that this desire is fundamentally irrelevant to the fact that her campaign to "end childhood obesity within a generation" does in fact have this effect).

Arguments about the presence or absence of good or bad intentions are ultimately distractions.  We could assume that every single person in legal academia who rejects the idea that law school has become indistinguishable as a functional matter from a  conscious scam does so with utmost sincerity and the purest of hearts. Yet this would make no difference to the analysis, in the fundamental sense that such an assumption doesn't create a single new job or pay down a dollar of any graduate's debt.

What this blog has been in large part about has been raising consciousness inside and around legal academia that what we intend our work to accomplish bears increasingly less relation to what our work does accomplish.  And, in the language of tort law, once that consciousness has been raised sufficiently, our harmful actions become fully "intentional" in the sense that we know what will result from them, no matter how sincerely we may not intend that result.

Trust

Practicing lawyers will tell you that trust is one of their greatest assets. If you shade the truth when talking to a judge, that judge will never rely upon your word again. If you mislead opposing counsel, whether through outright lies or too-clever omissions, you lose your colleagues' confidence. That loss hurts both the lawyer and all of her future clients. Every day, lawyers walk a fine line between representing their clients aggressively and damaging the trust they need to function in the profession.

Law schools also need trust--and, until recently, we've had it. Students trust us to teach them accurately and grade them fairly. Alumni trust us to use their donations for worthy purposes. When people read our scholarship, they trust us to be fair, to cite our sources, and to characterize those sources accurately. Applicants trust us to talk honestly about our institutions and what we have to offer.

We're about to lose that trust, if we haven't already. LawProf has already exposed some of the most egregious sleights in Dean Martin Katz's extraordinary plea for applicants. But I want to say something more about the opening paragraphs of that very misleading document.

Katz opens by appealing to authority. He tells potential applicants:

Last year, Forbes magazine – a respected source on value investing – touted the value of a legal education, referring to law school as a “relatively low-risk investment that will have an impact on your future and can pay exceptional dividends over a lifetime.”

This advice seems to fly in the face of the chorus of critics of legal education who would have you believe that going to law school today would be a terrible investment. So who is right? Forbes or the critics?

Though popular perceptions might lead you to follow the critics, the smart money should follow Forbes’ advice.

Trust Forbes, not the critics! It's a good line, except that Forbes did not endorse legal education in the way that Katz implies. The column cited by Katz was not written by “Forbes” or by any member of its editorial staff. It was written by a Forbes "contributor" named Shawn O'Connor. O'Connor is the CEO of StratusPrep, a company that offers LSAT test prep classes and law school admissions coaching.

Stratus will happily charge you $1,599 for its basic LSAT prep course. If you want more, you can pay for plenty of other services--all the way up to $7,180 for the "Diamond, All-in-One Package" that includes the LSAT class, 10 hours of LSAT tutoring, law school admissions counseling, and a law school "boot camp." Do you think O'Connor has a financial self interest in urging people to consider law school? Do you think his recommendation carries different weight than one from "Forbes"?

A sidebar to O'Connor's post explicitly states that "[t]he opinions expressed are those of the writer," not those of Forbes. That's a distinction that Dean Katz doesn't bother to make in telling prospective students that Forbes, "a respected source on value investing," has "touted the value of a legal education." If Dean Katz wants to tell applicants that the CEO of a company that makes lots of money selling LSAT prep courses has "touted the value of a legal education," that's fine. But he should be honest about his sources.

Forbes has published numerous columns about law schools and the legal job market. Contributor Peter Cohan, a management consultant and venture capitalist, asked just last week: Does America Need 202 Law Schools? Cohan suggested that "law schools are highly profitable for the professors and administrators," that "radical changes in the way law is practiced means that the high tuitions imposed on aspiring lawyers to get that law degree are less likely to pay off," and that "law schools do not want to teach students the nuts and bolts of lawyering." 

And then there was J. Maureen Henderson's column headlined Why Attending Law School Is the Worst Career Decision You'll Ever Make. Henderson, another Forbes contributor, described the "misleading stats" disseminated by law schools, the "scant 8% of 2011 grads [who] are working at firms that employ 250 or more attorneys," and the "dismal" starting salaries for lawyers in small towns or rural areas.

There was even a column by my law school classmate, Deborah Jacobs (who is actually on the Forbes staff as a Senior Editor) detailing The Case Against Law School. In that column, updated just last week, Jacobs discusses the high debt incurred by law students, the "abysmal job market," and the ways in which technology, outsourcing, and other practices continue to squeeze that market.

I'm not going to catalogue all of the posts about law school published by Forbes. There may be other contributors, like O'Connor, who think law school is a good investment. That's not the point. The point is that "Forbes" has not "touted the value of legal education" and Dean Katz should know that. 

Good lawyers don't misstate their sources. They don't tell the court or opposing counsel that a precedent "holds X," when X appears only in a non-binding concurrence. Nor do good scholars misstate their sources. We don't say that "Forbes" has endorsed a position when the viewpoint comes from a single contributor with a financial interest in the position he advocates.

Trust. It's an asset that matters even more than tuition dollars, and it's declining fast.

Update [LP]:  The text below seems increasingly relevant to both this incident and several other recent public pronouncements by law schools deans:

ABA Accreditation Standards

Standard 509. CONSUMER INFORMATION

(a) All consumer information that a law school reports, publicizes or distributes shall be complete, accurate and not misleading to a reasonable law school student or applicant. Schools shall use due diligence in obtaining and verifying consumer information. Violations of these obligations may result in sanctions under Rule 16 of the Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools.

Myths of Sisyphus

Last spring I participated in a “debate” with Martin Katz, dean of the University of Denver’s law school, at a bar association event.  It turned out not to be much of a debate:  I presented the argument I published subsequently in my article The Crisis of the American School, and Katz, who had read a draft of the article, said he basically agreed with that argument.

I don’t actually know Katz, but from the few encounters I’ve had with him over the years, he seems like a very bright guy, as well as a pleasant, charming person. These qualities naturally made me want to think well of him. On the other hand, because I realize such qualities are useful if you’re a politician, or a university administrator, or an investment banker, or a serial killer, etc., I’m also aware that as a rational matter being smart and pleasant and charming has exactly nothing to do with one’s character, or lack thereof.

So reading this made me both sad and angry.   It should make everyone who cares about reforming legal education both sad and angry, because it’s really bad stuff.  (A distinguished colleague from a distinguished law school located outside the great state of Colorado reacted to it thus:  “This is insane--so many misstatements and omissions . . . Their selective reporting violates any reasonable standard of professional ethics or academic integrity. Wow.”)

Reading it also made me realize that, for those of us in legal academia trying to do something about the mess we’ve collectively created, every morning our rock awaits us.  I don’t have the patience to go through the whole thing line by line, although practically every sentence in Katz’s argument features some sort of statistical sleight of hand or methodological chicanery that does him no credit. To put it bluntly, becoming a law school dean has either destroyed Marty Katz’s reasoning skills, or his willingness to put intellectual integrity ahead of the felt necessities of the time.  

Here I’ll focus on Katz’s treatment of DU’s employment and salary data for the class of 2011.  Katz argues that legal employment opportunities for new law graduates are on average much better in Colorado than in the country as a whole:

The math in Denver and Colorado is very different. Here the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment projects that there will be roughly 550 lawyer job openings per year over the next few years.[13] This figure understates the job opportunities for JDs in the state, since it only counts jobs for which bar passage is required. (While some critics scoff at jobs that do not require bar passage, many law school graduates seek and enjoy such jobs. Even during the boom years, when law graduates had fewer constraints, roughly 16% selected jobs for which bar passage was not required.[14]) But even counting only the 550 bar-passage-required jobs projected each year in Colorado, the situation looks good. When you consider that our state’s two law schools, the primary suppliers for Colorado’s legal market, produce fewer than 450 new law graduates per year, the math here looks favorable – more than one lawyer job for every law graduate in Colorado. And most of those jobs are in Denver.

Of course lawyers move across state lines. So a comparison of in-state law job openings to in-state law graduates may not fully capture the available jobs situation. Because Denver is such a desirable place to live and practice law, graduates from out of state law schools come here for jobs as well. In 2012, roughly 1,000 people passed the Colorado bar exam. However, because of our strong networks in the Denver legal community (roughly half of the practicing lawyers are our graduates) and our strategic plan designed to produce practice-ready lawyers, our graduates have a strong advantage in competing for jobs in this market.

This argument is weak well past the point of disingenuousness.  Presently about 1100 people pass the Colorado bar each year, so the ratio of available legal jobs to annual bar passers is two to one.  That figure should daunt the most special of snowflakes, but the actual situation is far more problematic than that ratio suggests.

First, lawyers from nearly 40 states can waive into the Colorado bar if they’ve been practicing for at least five of the last seven years, so the out of state competition for available jobs is hardly limited to out of state people who pass the bar exam.  (Recently, I wrote a letter of recommendation for a 2011 CU grad who was trying to get an “entry-level” DA job.  The only entry-level feature of the job turned out to be the pay -- $48,000 – as it ended up going to a lawyer who had been a DA in a Midwestern state since 2005, and who of course didn’t have to take the Colorado bar to get the job).

And newly available legal jobs don’t just go to experienced lawyers from other states. Some portion of those approximately 550 new jobs for lawyers this year will go to licensed Colorado attorneys who are not currently practicing law, and who have enormous advantages over new graduates in the struggle for scarce positions (For one thing they have actually practiced law, as opposed to  being – supposedly -- “practice-ready”).  In other words, the phrase “new jobs for lawyers” is far from synonymous with “jobs for new lawyers.”

As for the claim that “many law graduates seek and enjoy” non-law jobs, there’s an easy way to test this proposition, which is to look at the employment statistics at a law school where almost all graduates have the choice of taking a job that requires bar admission, and seeing how many choose a “JD preferred” or completely non-legal position instead.   For example, in the Stanford class of 2011 a total of nine people took JD preferred jobs, while one took a non-legally related professional position, and no one took a non-professional job.  By contrast at DU, 82 graduates took such jobs (the percentages for the respective classes at the two schools who took non-bar required jobs are 5.2% and 28.6%).

With the occasional exception of the person who enrolls in law school to study international sports law in order to become Leo Messi’s agent, people go to law school to be lawyers.  Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Katz’s argument is that, as he’s well aware, there’s no need to compare the total number of available legal jobs in Colorado to the total number of DU and CU law grads in order to speculate about how many local law graduates get such jobs.  He knows the answer to that question: in the class of 2011 140 of 287 DU graduates got full-time “long-term” -- meaning with a term of at least year, so this counts state district court judicial clerkships and the like -- jobs requiring bar admission.  (Almost everyone else in the class who was listed as holding a bar-required job nine months after graduation was in a short-term part-time position funded by the school itself).

Katz’s discussion of the “average” salary of DU law graduates is also problematic.  Katz asserts that the average salary of 2011 DU grads nine months after graduation was $70,922.  He even gives the impression that he’s being conservative about this, since he then makes the same adjustment NALP now makes with its salary data, which attempts to correct for the higher reporting rates for high salaried positions, and asserts that with this adjustment the average salary becomes $66,713 (What NALP does to create its “adjusted mean” salary figure is to assume that, for example, everyone working for  firms of two to ten lawyers is making the same average salary as the 35% of people working for such firms who  do report their salaries.  This is supposed to correct for the skewing of salary averages that takes place because, by contrast to small firms, 93% of big firm salaries are reported.  Needless to say a lot of can openers are being assumed in all this, as there’s every reason to believe that the reported salaries within cohorts are not representative of the  non-reported salaries within those cohorts).

But how many 2011 DU law graduates were actually making $71K or $67K in February of 2012?  We can’t know the exact answer, but we can make a pretty close approximation.  39% of the class had a salary reported, with a median of $57,500, so we could begin by observing that 19.5% of the class was reported to have a salary of $57,500 or more. Looking at the available data in more detail, the following graduates almost certainly weren’t being paid what Dean Katz characterizes as the “average” salary:

19 unemployed graduates.

3 graduates whose employment status was unknown.

5 graduates who went back to school.

4 graduates who started solo practices.

46 graduates working for firms of two to ten attorneys.  (In Colorado these jobs usually pay between $35,000 and $50,000).

73 graduates working in various public positions (the 75^th percentile for the 39 reported salaries in this group was $53,000).

28 graduates working in “academia” (26 of these jobs were both short-term and part-time).

59 graduates working in “business and industry.”  (It’s rare for a new law graduate to get an in-house legal job, and even rarer for such a graduate to get a high-paying non-legal job. Again for comparison purposes a total of nine 2011 Stanford graduates took “business and industry” jobs, and Stanford is one of a tiny handful of schools that does place a few graduates each year in high-paying consulting jobs and the like).

This leaves the 32 graduates working for law firms of more than ten attorneys.  How many of these people were making what Dean Katz is characterizing as the “average” salary of a 2011 DU graduate?  We can assume that the 14 graduates working for firms of more than 50 attorneys were.  Nine graduates were working for firms of 11-25 lawyers, and nine others got jobs with firms of 26-50.  Using NALP national averages for the class of 2011, we can estimate that three people in the former group and six in the latter were making at least $70,000.

So, by this estimate, it’s likely that somewhere around 23 of DU’s 287 graduates (8% of the class) were making $70,000 or more.  Now this estimate might be incorrect. It might be 10% of the class.  It could conceivably be 12%, if for example one assumes that a dozen of the “business and industry” jobs paid at least $70,000 (This is extremely unlikely in my view. Note that one graduate reported a salary of $350,000 – a figure that by itself raises the “average” reported salary for the class by nearly $4,000, and which suggests none of these figures should be considered models of scientific accuracy).

But by no conceivable stretch can $70,000 be characterized as an “average” – if by average one means in any way typical – salary for 2011 graduates of Dean Katz’s law school.

The saddest part of all this is that Dean Katz knows full well how misleading his presentation of these statistics is.  This wouldn’t necessarily be the case with every legal academic: there are people on law school faculties who don’t know the difference between a mean and median, and who believe that salary data regarding graduates are comprehensive and reliable.  Whatever else one might say about him Katz --who was a partner at a big Denver law firm before becoming a legal academic -- isn’t a blissfully clueless idiot.

What he is, I’m guessing, is increasingly desperate.  And desperate people do desperate things. 

In the long run

A reader suggested I take a look at Hamilton Nolan's ongoing Gawker series of unemployment stories.  They make for harrowing reading, and a lot of them are from attorneys.  Here's one from somebody still in free fall from a spot near the top of the profession:

Two years ago I was on top of the world – at least from exterior appearances. Barely past 30, my salary was approximately a quarter million dollars per year, I was living in a luxury high rise with a view of Central Park from my balcony, and it seemed I was on the fast track to a successful career. Now 18 months after losing my job at the end of 2010, I've learned a lot of valuable life lessons but find myself wondering, constantly every day, is there any hope left? The Manhattan apartment is long-gone and replaced with a room at my father's house in the exurbs of Atlanta, a house I helped him buy five years ago. I've applied for over 750 jobs in the last year, but still I wait. This is my story.
We hear a lot of talk about the employment crisis these days, from both sides of our so-called political spectrum. No one has much in the way of solutions, and the options for the unemployed seem to be Republicans that tell me what I need is to have my unemployment cut off – then surely I'll be motivated to find a job. Democrats at least don't think starvation will improve my job hunt, but beyond affording me my luxurious life on unemployment, I hear scant dedication to anything that might actually improve the employment outlook. I remain a voracious consumer of news and from what I see and hear portrayed in the media, the unemployed in this country are generally older, often former factory workers. We hear much discussion of how to address these workers in a nation that may no longer offer employment they have experience in. I feel for these workers and don't mean to diminish their situations – but I was supposed to be exempt from that. In fact, based on what the media says, I don't exist. I attended an Ivy League college and a top 5 law school (at least according to US News' rankings). My first real job, which started shortly after my 25th birthday, paid a salary of $125,000. That salary had doubled within 5 years. I was lucky enough to have the chance to go to some of the top schools in America, and it seemed I was enjoying the rewards of obtaining such a pedigree. Then it ended...

The question I find myself grappling with these days is "is this the best we can do?" I've spent months focusing on not being jealous or angry, and I've largely succeeded. I really am happy for my friends that are having children, and going on vacations, and otherwise moving forward and living their lives. But is this a country where one false move (in my case, working at the wrong law firm) can essentially end your chance at a productive life? I admit I had an arrogance prior to my layoff – I never imagined this could happen to me. I was no conservative, and I sympathized with and believed we could and should do more to help the unfortunate in this country – but I never believed I would be in that situation myself. I was told from childhood on that a good education was the path to a better life – and that if you were willing and able to work hard and had something to contribute, you'd have opportunities in this country. Where are those opportunities?

The most striking thing to me during the coverage of the Occupy Movement last fall was the "counter-protestors" (read: miserable assholes) yelling things like "Get a job!" I would love one! As I mentioned previously, I've applied for over 750 jobs in the last 18 months and continue to apply for 30-100 jobs each month. I've applied for jobs at law firms, scores of jobs with the government, jobs at corporations, jobs at non-profits, jobs for lawyers, jobs for non-lawyers, jobs as a paralegal, jobs as a writer, jobs, jobs, jobs. I've applied for jobs from Seattle to Miami, from San Diego to Boston, and I've applied to jobs overseas. Have work? Will travel. Of course, while employment is improving marginally overall, it hasn't improved in the legal sector. Total legal employment is lower now than it was in 2008, despite the abundance of law schools in this country pumping out nearly 50,000 new lawyers each year. I admit that I have not yet applied to work in fast food or retail as I maintain the hope that somehow, some way, I'll eventually find a position which could eventually lead me back to a semblance of my old life. That said, I don't see an abundance of "Help Wanted" signs at McDonald's or Best Buy. The notion that people can just "Get a Job!" in this market is laughable. The government's own numbers pretend that over 8 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce in recent years; while you may know of someone that struck oil in their backyard and actually retired in their 30s or 40s, I'm confident most of these people are simply unable to find employment. I wonder how they afford food – I fear for my own future when unemployment is cut off. 

I continue to have some hope – I keep trying to tell myself that I have great experience and a great background, and eventually that will mean something to someone somewhere. I know I'm hard working - I billed well over 2000 hours as my mother died of cancer in 2009 because the firm expected nothing less. (For the non-lawyers reading, that translates to working 60+ hours most weeks.) I also wonder and worry about the larger country – if finding work is so hard and seemingly hopeless for someone with my background, someone barely into their 30s, what is it like for older workers with fewer credentials?

As another day starts in the exurbs, I sigh. It's another day of nothing. I'll look at the usual job boards. I'll read the 10+ emails I receive each morning with updated job listings. I'll head to the gym. But in general, another day will come and go and nothing will change. Maybe I'll receive a rejection letter or two. Maybe I'll find a new posting for a job that would be perfect – if only they decide to interview me. But really, I just wait. I watch the clock spin in circles. I watch my life pass me by. I wonder how much longer this can last. And I wait.

A few comments:

(1) The most glaring gap in the relevant data for people trying to figure out what the long-term value of law degrees actually is these days is that we have so little information on long-term career outcomes.  We have huge amounts of data -- much of it of dubious reliability, but still -- on immediate post-grad outcomes, which, as everyone outside the impenetrable special snowflake bubble now knows, look pretty awful.

But what about nine years after graduation as opposed to nine months?  One commenter on this site has posted dozens of comments about how law is a demographic pyramid, with fewer and fewer jobs available for middle-aged lawyers, and with rampant age discrimination simply being a standard feature of big firm and perhaps also in-house hiring and firing practices.  As far as I can tell this perspective is anecdotal, which certainly doesn't discredit it, but we clearly need a lot of longitudinal work done on the subject.  (Things such as this study of the UVA class of 1990 are a start, but obviously a snapshot of one 23-year-old elite law school's graduating class 17 years after graduation in 2007 throws a very limited light on the present overall situation).

(2) In particular, given that BigLaw is the only initial career option that makes any economic sense for anybody paying anything remotely close to sticker at about 75% of all law schools, we need more information on current as opposed to past exit options for BigLaw associates.  Of course only about 15% of current graduates will ever work in BigLaw, but the importance of this demographic for law schools can hardly be overstated.  Legal academics who complain about Kids Today thinking that a law degree should be a guarantee of a high-paying job need to answer this question: Why exactly does it make sense for anybody to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs by going to your law school, unless doing so guarantees at least a reasonably good shot at acquiring at least a temporarily high-paying job for at least a reasonable amount of time?

Anyway, the "realistic" career path for students at the (12? 7? 4?) law schools that can still produce something resembling an actual answer to that question is:

(a) Top Law School

(b) Associate at V-whatever firm for X years, which will be dedicated to paying down debt and preparing for life post V-whatever firm.

(c) ???

How attractive (c) does or does not end up being for people currently in or considering law school is critical to the viability of what elite law schools are selling going forward, which in turn is for psychological/ideological reasons critical to the viability of what non-elite schools are selling, even though only a tiny minority of non-elite law school graduates will ever be on this particular career path.

(3)  A particularly critical benefit of their jobs that tenured legal academics tend to undervalue when they burble on about how they turned down lucrative careers for the vows of scholarly poverty is that their salaries don't have to be -- or haven't had to be until now -- discounted by any risk of falling to zero and staying there.  It's hard  to put a number on just how valuable that benefit is, not merely in terms of extrapolating income into the future, but in terms of the psychic benefit of not having  the shadow of possible economic disaster constantly falling on whatever career success a lawyer is currently enjoying.  This is just another way in which, as a practical matter, legal academics aren't really part of the legal profession at all.

Today, thinking like a lawyer means thinking a lot about what will happen if and when you lose your current job.  To the very limited extent that some legal academics may actually be starting to think about that, they are, in a sense, coming slightly closer to rejoining the profession they were so eager to escape.

The American Way

I have an article in Salon on how the law school mess is an early warning signal for a system of higher education that is ultimately unsustainable, given the economic base from which its ideological superstructure (i.e., the axiomatic claim that educational debt is good debt) rises.

In the short term, lots of institutions are banking (literally) on young people continuing to play a losing game because of poor information and -- even more crucially -- a widespread belief that with no apparent good alternatives, it makes sense to roll the dice by buying radically overpriced credentials, in the hope that something will work out.

The other day, in the context of an argument about law school budgets, I heard the head of an admissions committee say with perfect complacency that there really wasn't much to worry about, because after all, what were these kids going to do, become investment bankers? This remark elicited an equally complacent chuckle from many of his colleagues.

At that moment I had, perhaps for the first time in my life, a visceral sense of exactly why revolutions tend to be so violent. Not, of course, that I believe the lost generation is likely to head for the barricades any time soon.  But if something cannot go on forever . . .

The twenty-year drop

There was a lot of press last week about this year's dramatic fall in law school applicants. LawProf and I noted the carnage a few weeks ago: Law schools are about to hit a 30-year low in the number of applicants. The graph, if you haven't seen it, looks like this:

That's pretty dismal. From a peak of 100,000 applicants, reached in both 1991 and 2003, applicants this year will drop below 60,000--and almost certainly below 55,000.

But even this graph doesn't convey the full extent of disenchantment with legal education. The line looks vaguely cyclical. If applicant numbers rose between 1985 and 1991, and again between 1997 and 2003, won't they rise again? Is this just a temporary down-turn?

To answer those questions, and understand the full extent of the shortfall facing law schools, we need to look at law school applicants as a percentage of college graduates. During the last thirty years, the number of college graduates has grown substantially--and those graduates form the pool of potential law school applicants.

As the number of college graduates increased, the tally of law school applicants should have increased or at least remained steady. Instead, when measured as a percentage of college graduates, law school applicants have declined significantly over the last twenty years:

In 1991, the high point for law schools, about 1,100,000 people earned college degrees. The same year, 99,377 people applied to law school--a ratio of 9%. That doesn't mean that 9% of all college seniors applied to law school in 1991; each year's applicant pool includes older graduates along with college seniors. The ratio of applicants to contemporary college grads, however, is an excellent indicator of interest in law school.

This year, approximately 1,750,000 people will earn college degrees. But we project no more than 55,000 law school applicants. The ratio for this year is 3%--just one-third what it was in 1991.

Accounting for the growth in college graduates makes clear that law schools are not suffering a sudden or cyclical drop in applicants. Interest in our degree has fallen fairly steadily over the last twenty years. There was a small uptick of interest during the 2002 recession, but no increase at all during the Great Recession. At best, that more recent recession bought us a short pause in the decline.

What if we measured law school applicants as a percentage of all adults with a college degree? This graph shows the number of law school applicants as a percentage of all college grads over age 25; it complements the previous graph by exploring law school's appeal to older applicants. Here, the decline is even steeper:

These graphs persuade me that the drop in law school applicants is not cyclical; it's not related to the recession and jobless recovery; it's not even based solely on the most recent contraction in the legal market. College graduates have been losing interest in law school--compared to other graduate programs or workplace opportunities--for the last twenty years.

What accounts for that decline? During those same two decades, law school tuition has risen extravagantly:

Even with student loans, we live in a market economy: When price rises, demand usually falls. Law schools thought their consumers were "price insensitive" and continued raising tuition. We didn't see that some students were price sensitive, and were turning away from our degree, because we were floating on a cushion of rising college graduation rates.

Now we've burned through the cushion. The steady decline has reached the point where we'll struggle to fill first-year seats. With poor placement rates, increased transparency about job outcomes, and ongoing shifts in legal practice, it will be very difficult for law schools to reverse this twenty-year trend. If we hope to do so, we have to look candidly at the roots of our long-term slide. One of those roots surely is the price of legal education. Rising cost, falling demand. Simple market economics.

Wall Street Journal story implies we may not need more law schools

The Wall Street Journal has a story today on new law schools that are opening in Indiana and Texas, despite a cratering job market, skyrocketing debt, and a rapidly shrinking applicant pool.

Members of the law-school class of 2011 had little better than a 50-50 shot at landing a job as a lawyer within nine months of receiving their degree, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis last year. At the same time, some law graduates are saddled with as much as $150,000 in student-loan debt, in part because tuition is rising faster than the rate of inflation.

The statistics do give some educators pause. "It seems like the worst possible time to open a new law school," said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and frequent law-school critic who last year published a book titled "Failing Law Schools."

It's worth noting that, rather than representing anything like a worst-case scenario, $150,000 probably represents the average law school debt carried by 2012 graduates of private law schools at graduation.  (The average amount borrowed during law school by 2011 graduates of such schools was $125,000, which doesn't include accrued interest.  The average amount borrowed has been going up by about 5% per year, and accrued interest adds more than 15% to the principal at these debt levels.  These figures don't include other educational debt).

One feature of this subject that doesn't get much attention is the rate at which law school expansion has been accelerating.  The number of ABA law schools increased by four over the course of the 1980s and by seven during the 1990s.  Between 2000 and and 2009 the ABA accredited 18 new law schools, even as the evidence of a hyper-saturated market for lawyers became increasingly compelling.

BTW one myth purveyed by denialists -- Steve Diamond, who makes the claim in the WSJ story that "the financial backing [these new schools] have is presumably looking down the road beyond the downturn," is particularly fond of it -- is that the market for new attorneys was basically fine until it suddenly collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007.  In fact a full third of all law graduates weren't getting legal jobs in the "golden years" prior to 2007.  Here are the percentages from NALP of graduates whose employment status was known who had full-time jobs requiring bar admission nine months after graduation:

2001: 68.3
2002: 67.0
2003: 65.5
2004: 65.1
2005: 66.7
2006: 68.3

This is an average for all schools.  For the bottom 100, and especially for schools in the tier to which Indiana Tech and UT-North Dallas aspire, the percentage of graduates getting jobs was more on the order of 50%, even in the "best" of times.

The 2007 financial crisis hit BigLaw hiring hard, and by extension the employment figures for elite and semi-elite schools, but of course the vast majority of law schools have never sent more than a small percentage of their graduates to large law firms. The crisis had only a marginal effect on the already-bad employment numbers of about 170 of the 200-odd ABA schools. 

As for the justifications for opening yet more law schools in the even more dire post-2007 environment, the WSJ story quotes the usual nonsense about access and affordability and practice-ready hands-on graduates:

Ellen S. Pryor, associate dean for academic affairs at UNT Dallas College of Law, said her school aims to serve local college students seeking an affordable, hands-on legal education, and will draw a different pool of applicants than other north Texas law schools.

"I know applications are down," Ms. Pryor said, but "the fact that nationwide numbers are down doesn't dishearten us from thinking we'll get really good students and fulfill our mission."

UNT Dallas hasn't revealed yet what it plans to charge in tuition for its entering class of 2014, but Indiana Tech, which is putting forth precisely the same babble about why it's opening a law school, will charge nearly $30,000 per year to this fall's entering class, assuming there is one (andre douglas pond cummings, his resplendent moniker brutally subjected to abbreviation and capitalization by the capitalist capitalizers of the WSJ editorial staff, reveals that Indiana Tech is having quite a bit of trouble rounding up 100 intrepid souls for its entering class, so jah willing perhaps this particular farcical enterprise won't even get off the ground).